Two New Tools for Better Email in Gmail

Like many business owners, I manage multiple email accounts. For many years, I used Mac computers exclusively. The native email client, Mail, never quite cut it because it was difficult to strike a balance between storing enough old email to be useful and having so much old email that it bogged the computer down. Fortunately there are many nice little Mac programs that will add a Gmail monitor to your task bar, so you can quickly see and reply to incoming messages.

Now that I’m using Windows again, I thought I would be able to use Outlook to manage my accounts, but for the life of me I cannot get it to reliably access more than one account. So, through it all, I have been using Google Business Apps to manage my business email accounts through Gmail. I use Chrome to access my accounts; several funnel into a main email account, and for others I have to log out and log back in to access them. This isn’t my ideal setup, but it does allow me to use a couple of very nice extensions I found that make Gmail even better.

Rapportive – This free extension replaces the ads that appear to the right of your email text with details for your contact. It pulls information from LinkedIn, MailChimp, and your own contact data to show your contact’s photos, job title, location, and recent updates, making it easier to add a personal touch to your communications.

Right Inbox – This extension adds my number-one most-wished-for feature to Gmail: the ability to draft an email and schedule it for delivery at a later time. This is great, for example, for scheduling an appointment confirmation as soon as I book the appointment. It also has some nifty features for recurring emails, reminders, and attaching private notes to emails, but so far I’ve only used the delivery scheduling feature. It’s free for use with up to 10 emails per month, and after that it’s a few dollars a month to upgrade.

Do you use similar features in other apps? What are your favorite extensions or tools for email in Mac? Let me know in the comments below.

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